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impossible to know what my father did and how he thought at this time. What was he doing in
Germany? What was he planning to do? The only surviving remnants of his time in Germany are a few
photographs from the early 1960s as well as an address and a large number of books in German. I
would often look through his books to try to understand what he was interested in, what he was driven
by.
Finally, my father decided to move on, and as luck would have it, the Soviet government had
established a scholarship system for Arab students. My research tells me that approximately two
thousand Arabs benefited from the scholarships over the lifetime of the program. My father enrolled
at Leningrad Polytechnic in what is now Saint Petersburg in 1964 and graduated in 1968 with a
Russian wife—my mother, Lioudmila Alexandrovna Blagoveshenskaya.
My mother was born to Alexander Blagoveshenskaya and his first wife, my grandmother, who died
in 1945 at the age of thirty, approximately. My mother had a younger half-brother, Valerii, and a
stepsister, Valentina. They grew up in the industrial city of Rybinsk, the regional capital of Yaroslav
Region just north of Moscow. After graduating from school my mother worked in a chemicals factory
for three years before enrolling in the same university as my father. They met while studying
engineering and married in 1968. A cousin of mine recently found me on Facebook and recounted that
he had tried to find out more about the family history. He managed to ascertain that many of our male
relatives had been Orthodox priests who had been killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
In a strange way, my parents’ lives were similar to the extent that they were born in relatively poor
circumstances, in marginal areas of the regions where they grew up. They benefited from government
scholarships and money lent by family and friends over the years.
Soon after they married, my parents made their way back to the Emirates—which were still
regarded as under British control. Oil had already been discovered in Abu Dhabi, and there were
rumors that there might be hydrocarbons in the other Emirates. My parents went to Ras al Khaimah,
which was experiencing a property boom of sorts as wealthy Gulf Arabs from Kuwait, Bahrain, and
Saudi Arabia bought land in anticipation of the discovery of oil.
Interestingly, oil was never found in commercial quantities in the Northern Emirates and so many
speculators from the late 1960s and early 1970s still own large swathes of land in Ras al Khaimah.
My father found himself a job in the local municipality as an engineer. Over the years he had learned
a number of languages including English, Russian, German, and classical Arabic.
He soon found himself working part-time in the entourage of the ruler of Ras al Khaimah at the
time—Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al Qasimi. In 1971, the United Arab Emirates was formed of six
Emirates along the coast of the Arabian Gulf, which lies opposite the coast of Iran. As these
developments preceded the Iranian Revolution, Iran was still ruled by the Mohammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi of the Iranian monarchy. The British had made it clear that they were intent on leaving the
area and so had assisted the Emirates to unite and form a federal government. Ras al Khaimah only
joined the federation in 1972, as the seventh member of the UAE.
When the UAE was formally announced in 1971, Iran immediately invaded three islands belonging